You wouldn’t know it from looking at my barely 5’7” stature and Pillsbury Dough Boy physique, but all through high school I was an all-state goalkeeper (it was Arkansas in the 1980s, so don’t be too impressed).
I can’t say I follow the game closely anymore, but when the World Cup is on, I watch most of the matches in the opening round, and all of them from the quarterfinals onward. But I get really bent watching the men’s game, because for 90 minutes 50 men become pathological liars and gaslighters.
Everyone knows about “flopping,” of course. The other side of that coin is when a player who commits a flagrant foul immediately jumps up wagging both index fingers at the ref, saying, “Nuh UH. What you just saw didn’t happen.”
This has always annoyed me, but nowadays, when the same behavior is characteristic of our political life, it incenses me. It reminds me of a guy I knew who posted on Facebook during the January 6 insurrection, “What you’re seeing on TV isn’t what’s really happening.”
George Orwell famously loathed international football, calling it “the continuation of war by other means.” A quotation more relevant now comes from 1984: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
I guess what Danny Rojas says on Ted Lasso is true: “Football is life.”
